Archive for the ‘Christmas’ Tag

373.3 at start of week, 34.0 miles on the week for 407.3 since 18 November. Also this week: broke the 2000 mile barrier for the year with a few days to spare.

Sunday 24 December:

Christmas Eve with everything important in for the feast on the morrow, I headed to Harrow & Wealdstone to tie a bow on some of the middle of the Metropolitan Line and the northern extremes of the Bakerloo (7.0 miles).

In the last mile I remembered that we were gifted a Christmas Pudding (I don’t recommend them, by the way) and started scanning the gardens I passed for a sprig of holly to stick in the top of it before dousing it with brandy and setting it ablaze.

Christmas: The duck was in the oven, the dressing was ready to bake, and yet we had no crackers. Already on the Christmas Cheer (egg nog to start, then rum in the coffee, then just rum) I went in search of some at corner shops, managing to find none in the 4.1 mile loop.

Boxing Day:

Sticking close to home, again, I managed 4 miles before we settled in to watch movies all day and listen to records most of the night. Happy Christmas!

Wednesday thru Friday 27-29 December:

No maps, as they are all close to home and standard fare and barely making the Run Streak minimum (3.0 Wednesday, 4.0 Thursday, and 4.4miles on Friday).

But, of note: Wednesday’s run took me to 2001.9 miles on the year, so I kind of feel like coasting into the New Year.

Saturday 30 December:

Finished the week, weakly, with a crawl from Watford Junction to Harrow & Wealdstone, 7.5 miles.

The enforced jollity of the office Christmas party is worth avoiding but I feel obliged to show up at least every other year. There’s always the opportunity for the Dutch farewell, the Irish goodbye, the French leave … pissing off before the games get started, essentially. This year, I pulled more of a Northern Irish goodbye: this is where you tell a few key people in advance to limit any loss of life.

This year, our research group had the do in Exeter College which has one of my favourite chapels at the University. Since this is almost certainly my last Christmas at Oxford, this was a nice surprise and blunted the edge of the generally shit situation.

Our Professor’s P.A. chased up our RSVPs diligently and also checked for any dietary requirements or prohibitions. I replied, “I don’t like things with mayonnaise in them. Other than that, if you consider it food, then so do I.” It was more a joke than anything, but as the starters were doled out one of the servers stopped by my assigned seat to ask, on behalf of the chef, if it is because of eggs that I don’t want mayo. “No, I just find mayonnaise an abomination.”

So, the assigned seating resulted in bespoke treatment from the kitchen. Fantastic attention to detail, there.

It was surprising, then, that I was seated only one space away from the shithead who’s continued residence in the lab has prompted my efforts to find other employment (which has, finally, come to fruition albeit delayed until the early Spring while the folks at the new site write a position for me). This particular dickhead is a complete sociopath and unwilling to take a hint, a request, or a direct order to shut his fucking mouth and leave someone the hell alone. It isn’t a secret that I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, so this seating arrangement is especially egregious (or, maybe the boss just wants to hurry me along — this is the sort of move to encourage it).

As a result, I cut the evening even shorter than planned and skipped coffee and pudding.

Just as well, I reckon. The next item on the agenda would be the distribution of Secret Santa presents. I find the joke gifts insulting and tiresome so I only ever give these to people I find loathsome. One year, I drew the name of an especially arrogant sack of shite and bought a presentation-style wine box and stuck a bottle of Buckfast in it. The box was more valuable than the bottle, and his disappointment at the contents was worth going over budget.

But, generally I try to give thoughtful treats even though I have never received anything useful, beautiful, or even slightly amusing.

I plucked the name of one of the new DPhil students and did a bit of cyber-stalking to find that he is a classical music buff. I really don’t know anything else about him, so I decided I’d just get him some music that I would like for myself.

The record store I went to had a really limited classical music selection so my first (the recent re-release of Glen Gould’s Goldberg Variations) and second (Beethoven’s 7th, especially for the 2nd movement) choices were not in the bins. I settled on Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony (#7) as a piece of music with a moving story of its premier performance. Besieged and starving, under relentless Nazi bombardment in Leningrad the musicians — drawn from troops and the citizenry — broadcasted the piece from a bombed out hall to loudspeakers across the city and down the defence lines.

An appropriate piece for the start of any doctoral programme.

[UPDATE: Someone dropped off my Secret Santa gift and I re-gifted it to a colleague. “Don’t you want to know what it is?” he asked and started to open it. “Get that fucking thing out of here. I mean, ‘no, no thank you.'” I am quite sure it was shit, figuratively or maybe even literally.]

It has already been pointed out that running station-to-station is not how it is meant to be done and a guy on the bus I hopped off at Hillingdon with said it again when I told him of my plans. “It isn’t the destination but the journey that counts,” is especially apt for this project where the segments between stations are the key goals (not the stations themselves).

The beginning of a long weekend and end of a long day at work, I only needed 3 miles for the Holiday Run Streak and there was no way in Hell I was going to do more than 4 ahead of the series planned for the next several days. From Hillingdon, I headed into the darkness lit occasionally by the festive lighting:

Ickenham and Ruislip Stations fell to the list and I headed homeward.

This morning at Ruislip Station I became intrigued by this mattress advert:

I get it. They are testing these for mechanical endurance in a lab using thing that everybody will have on their bed. Above, you might spot the laptop PC and the dog but did you also notice the fake boobs and the fetish boots? Great mattress advert!

Notes: Neither of us is Christmassy this year but it is Winter and that requires/demands gorging. I baked a gallon of biscotti to go with the pair of Vin Santos on the wine rack, there’s a round of cornbread soon to be a dressing ingredient for the turkey crown tomorrow, and there’s some raw pizza sauce in the background. I sold my keyboard on e-Bay and am waiting for the guy to come pick it up (down to just the uke and the guitar). Jackie begged off the Peanuts Christmas this year but I listened to David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries on my run a little while ago. Ho. Ho. Ho.

Notes: I can’t fault this beer in any way at all. The venue, Brew Dog in Shepherds Bush, is as annoying as getting stuck on a broken down subway full of people on their way to Comic Con or a gaming convention.